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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Radio dramatist Orson Welles caused mass hysteria and frightened tens of thousands of listeners causing people to flee from their homes and praying for salvation when the play War of the Worlds was aired on Radio, The dramatization was so good people mistook the play for newscasts which caused the panic.

For almost 30 years, as the presenter of Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, Savile was an ubiquitous and distinctive face on television — an improbable figure with a helmet of platinum hair, dressed in a lurid track suit and bedecked in ostentatious jewelery. As he waggled an outsize cigar, he would utter a series of catch-phrases ("Howzabout that then", "Now then, now then...") which were usually punctuated by a bizarre yodel, and were a gift to even the most limited of television and nightclub impressionists.

The Story So Far

From a scientific perspective, this is all extremely sketchy. What the E-Cat purports to do is turn a little bit of input energy, plus hydrogen, into a huge amount of output energy (heat) using a nickel catalyst with only copper as a byproduct: somehow, hydrogen combines with nickel to create copper while giving off heat. So technically, it's not cold fusion, but a low energy nuclear reaction.

Some calculations of one test run showed an output of 30 kilowatt-hours after an initial input of only nine kilowatt-hours, and the final generator should produce energy at a rate of six to one. This isn't "free" energy — hydrogen is being used up. But only a tiny amount of hydrogen is used, relative to the amount of energy being produced, and there are no carbon or radioactive outputs at all.

At least, this is what we've all been told is going on. But nobody knows for sure, and this weekend will be the first independent verification of the power input and output of a one megawatt reactor based on E-Cat technology.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Afraid of tearing your delicate rotator cuff in an overly heated snowball fight? The Crossbow Snow Launcher ($40) can save you from career-ending surgery. Simply load a snowball into the front, pull back the lever, and fire your icy projectile up to 60 feet. Snowball press included for the truly lazy.

(CNN) -- Thailand is facing its worst flooding since 1942, with 373 people dead, more than nine million affected and 28 -- or more than a third -- of the nation's provinces at least partially flooded after a series of strong seasonal storms that brought exceptional rainfall.More than a billion cubic meters of runoff are expected to pass through some of the northern parts of Bangkok on its way toward the Gulf of Thailand, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, as high tides are set to peak on Saturday.

On Sunday, Hull switched his avatar to the image above and wrote, "New pic for all my friends in buffalo xoxo." Which is the greatest thing in the history of all-time, ever.

As a refresher for the youngin's in the crowd: In triple overtime of Game 6 of the 1999 Stanley Cup Final, Brett Hull of the Dallas Stars shot the puck on Domink Hasek of the Buffalo Sabres, who made the save. The rebound went outside the crease to Hull's skate, and he kicked it to his stick. His left skate entered the crease, he shot again and he scored to win the Cup for Dallas in Buffalo.

Except … at that time, the NHL had a completely asinine rule on the books in which a goal was disallowed if any part of an offensive player's skate was in the crease before the puck. Other goals in the regular season that resembled Hull's were disallowed; his was allowed to stand, and the Sabres lost in the Final.

The rationale: That the NHL had declared earlier that season, in a memo to teams, that if a player was in control of the puck, his skate could be in the crease. Despite the save and rebound, they considered it one big possession.

E-Cat is short for the term “energy catalyzer” and is an invention of Italian engineer Andrea Rossi. The E-Cat is a device in which hydrogen gas, powdered nickel metal, and an undisclosed catalyst are combined to produce a large amount of heat through a little understood low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) process inside a specially designed chamber. The inner workings of the reactor are covered by a trade secret which Rossi consistently refuses to discuss.

In this process, when an external heat source is applied (Electric or fossil) it is claimed that the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, a proton, penetrates a nickel nucleus and in doing so a nickel atom becomes a copper atom, and releases gamma rays creating a large amount of thermal energy. From reports of tests, it appears that the reaction begins when the reactor is heated to around 60 degrees Celsius, and once the reaction is stable, the external heat can be turned off and the reaction can continue for a considerable length of time. In an October 6th test in Bologna, Italy, the E-Cat ran without external heat (referred to as ‘self-sustain mode) for almost four hours, maintaining a constant temperature and boiling water continuously.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Lutz said his office had started to get phone calls at about 5.30pm that wild animals were loose on a road that runs under Interstate 70.He said four deputies with assault rifles in a truck went to the farm, where they found the owner, Terry Thompson, dead and all the animal cage doors open.

He would not say how Thompson died but said several aggressive animals were near his body when deputies arrived and had to be shot.Thompson, who lived on the property, had orangutans and chimps in his home, but they were still in their cages, Lutz said.The deputies, who saw many other animals standing outside their cages and others that had escaped past the fencing surrounding the property, began shooting them on sight. They said there had been no reports of injuries among the public.